With mature wisdom and youthful exuberance, Cruz tells an important story of the possibilities life offers.
Above-average sports autobiography by New York Giants star wide receiver Cruz.
After scoring a touchdown, Cruz always dances the salsa in honor of his Puerto Rican grandmother and as a reminder of the formidable odds he had to overcome to reach iconic sports status. Born and raised in the tough town of Paterson, N.J., where trouble was always easy to find, Cruz was blessed with athletic talent but also intelligence, determination and, most importantly, mentors. His grandparents, mother and father—a Paterson firefighter who entered Cruz’s life at age 7—insured he would make the right choices, channeling his talents and energies into sports and school. Cruz, ably assisted by FOXSports.com writer Schrager, offers loving portraits of these and others who shaped his life. After receiving a scholarship to UMass Amherst (only after taking the SATs several times to reach the required score), he promptly flunked out, not once, but twice. “My behavior,” he notes in a refreshing bit of candor, “was shameful…I had become the stereotypical dumb jock.” After penance at a community college and work in a mall, Cruz graduated from college. Then, unheralded and undrafted, he was signed by the Giants. The author devotes much of the narrative to the Giants’ road to the Super Bowl, but the real story is Cruz’s journey, including all the triumphs and tragedies and the people who loved and guided him.
With mature wisdom and youthful exuberance, Cruz tells an important story of the possibilities life offers.Pub Date: July 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-451-41615-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celebra/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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